Deathwatch: Nokia sack more staff and sign up with Windows

Nokia aren't having a great time of it at the moment and, in their bid to cost-cut €1bn, they've announced that they're to cull a further 3,500 jobs. That's 1,300 jobs from its location and commerce division and they'll be closing its Cluj factory in Romania, resulting in 2,200 job losses.

Even though Nokia is still the world's biggest phone maker (by volume), these redundancies signal troubling times for the Finnish phonemakers.

In April, they said they'd axe 4,000 jobs and transfer 3,000 employees to Accenture, as new chief executive Stephen Elop restructured the company to focus on smartphones (well done on realising that everyone was getting on that so quickly). This brings the total number of job losses at Nokia to 10,500. That's around one sixth of the company's whole workforce, worldwide.

"We are seeing solid progress against our strategy, and with these planned changes we will emerge as a more dynamic, nimble and efficient challenger," Elop said in a statement. "We must take painful, yet necessary, steps to align our workforce and operations with our path forward."

The company will eventually launches devices based on Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system, which seems like an incredibly risky move in light of the fact that most of the world is on Android or Apple. It's these moves that have seen Nokia's share price halve since February.

"Europe is core to Nokia's future. In addition to our headquarters, we have a strong R&D [research and development] presence in Europe," Elop said. "We have four major R&D sites in Finland and two major R&D sites in Germany, as well as Nokia Research Centres and other supporting R&D sites in Europe.

"Nokia also retains a strong local presence in our many sales offices throughout this region, as well as our operations in Salo and Komarom."

Surely them closing their own manufacturing plant is just good business. Suprised they even manufactured themselves rather than outsourced to China anyway.
Surely can't be long befor MS try to snaffle the whole business though, they need a flagship for their mobile OS and the nokia brand would do the trick.